The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

By Char Miller and Jeff Crane

The Nature of Hope focuses on the dynamics of environmental activism at the local level, examining the environmental and political cultures that emerge in the context of conflict. The book considers how ordinary people have coalesced to demand environmental justice and highlights the powerful role of intersectionality in shaping the on-the-ground dynamics of popular protest and social change.
 
Through lively and accessible storytelling, The Nature of Hope reveals unsung and unstinting efforts to protect the physical environment and human health in the face of continuing economic growth and development and the failure of state and federal governments to deal adequately with the resulting degradation of air, water, and soils. In an age of environmental crisis, apathy, and deep-seated cynicism, these efforts suggest the dynamic power of a “politics of hope” to offer compelling models of resistance, regeneration, and resilience. The contributors frame their chapters around the drive for greater democracy and improved human and ecological health and demonstrate that local activism is essential to the preservation of democracy and the protection of the environment. The book also brings to light new styles of leadership and new structures for activist organizations, complicating assumptions about the environmental movement in the United States that have focused on particular leaders, agencies, thematic orientations, and human perceptions of nature.
 
The critical implications that emerge from these stories about ecological activism are crucial to understanding the essential role that protecting the environment plays in sustaining the health of civil society. The Nature of Hope will be crucial reading for scholars interested in environmentalism and the mechanics of social movements and will engage historians, geographers, political scientists, grassroots activists, humanists, and social scientists alike.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Feb 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781607328483

Book preview

The Nature of Hope

Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change

edited by

Char Miller and Jeff Crane

- - - -

SERIES

INTERSECTIONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS | UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

© 2018 by University Press of Colorado | Utah State University Press

Published by University Press of Colorado

245 Century Circle, Suite 202

Louisville, Colorado 80027

All rights reserved

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-847-6 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-907-7 (paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-848-3 (ebook)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5876/9781607328483

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Char, 1951– editor. | Crane, Jeff, editor.

Title: The nature of hope : grassroots organizing, environmental justice, and political change / edited by Char Miller and Jeffrey Crane.

Description: Louisville : University Press of Colorado, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018041476| ISBN 9781607328476 (cloth) | ISBN 9781607329077 (pbk) | ISBN 9781607328483 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism—United States. | Community organization—United States. | Political participation—United States. | Environmental justice—United States.

Classification: LCC GE195 .N42 2018 | DDC 363.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041476

The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Saint Martin’s University toward the publication of this book.

Cover photograph, Native Nations Rise march in Washington D.C., March 2017, by S L O W K I N G. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Char Miller and Jeff Crane

Building Agency

1. Movements without Leaders: How to Make Change on an Overheating Planet

Bill McKibben

2. An Intersectional Reappraisal of the Environmental-Justice Movement

Brinda Sarathy

3. Power to the People: Grassroots Advocacy for Environmental Protection and Democratic Governance

Cody Ferguson and Paul Hirt

Spatial Dynamics

4. Returning to the Slough: Environmental Justice in Portland, Oregon

Ellen Stroud

5. Streetscape Environmentalism: Flood Control, Social Justice, and Political Power in Modern San Antonio, 1921–1974

Char Miller

6. When the Sky Opened: The Transformation of Tachikawa Air Base into Showa Kinen Park

Adam Tompkins and Charles Laurier

7. Friendship Park: Environmental Placemaking at the US-Mexico Border

Jill M. Holslin

Healthy Politics

8. From Bomb to Bone: Children and the Politics of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Jeffrey C. Sanders

9. Fear, Knowledge, and Activism: Toxic Anxieties in the 1980s

Michael Egan

10. Raising Change: Community Farming as Long-Term Ecological Protest

Jeff Crane

11. Building Sustainable Communities in Los Angeles: Intersections of Worker Power and Environmental Justice

Anna J. Kim and Sophia Cheng

Challenging Resources

12. Confronting Kennecott in the Cascades

Adam M. Sowards

13. Oil and Water: Fracking Politics in South Texas

Hugh Fitzsimmons

14. New Dawn for Energy Justice in North Carolina

Monica Mariko Embrey

15. The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Justice, and US Settler Colonialism

Kyle Powys Whyte

About the Authors

Index

Acknowledgments

The editing of a collection is a challenging and rewarding process. We owe a great deal to the contributors to The Nature of Hope: they wrote intriguing essays, hit every deadline, and believe in the project as much as we do. We also owe considerable thanks to Jessica d’Arbonne, formerly of the University Press of Colorado, who was with us every step of the way (and then some); she and her colleagues have been a joy to work with throughout the various stages of production. Char Miller is also indebted to co-editor Jeff Crane—naturally! A special dedicatory shout-out to his students and colleagues in the Environmental Analysis Program in the Claremont Consortium: for more than a decade, they have been raising incisive questions about the fundamental principles of US environmentalism and its oft-hesitant embrace of issues of access, justice, and equity. We have framed The Nature of Hope in part to advance these claims on the movement and, by extension, the larger society.

Jeff Crane thanks Char Miller, first and foremost. It has been a deep pleasure working with a top-notch environmental historian he studied in graduate school. As always, Jennine, Ella, and Chloe Crane have supported his work and endured the time apart as he wrote and edited others’ work. Michael Egan helped conceive this book originally and is an inspiration in his commitment to helping ensure that environmental history remains relevant to the issues we face today. Andrew Lopenzina has been a steady and supporting voice, encouraging Jeff to maintain his commitment to scholarship. Similarly, Andrew Orr has been a wonderful companion in sharing ideas about scholarship and publishing. Sonalini Sapra has welcomed Jeff into her classroom to discuss food justice and community farming and generously edited a rough draft of his chapter. Finally, Jeff thanks the crew at the University of the Incarnate Word who supported community farming and challenged Jeff to become better at community engagement, more patient as an organizer, and positive in the efforts to create change. Monica Cruz, Denise Krohn, Michelle Wilk, Stephen Lucke, Jessica Thompson, Robert Langston, Chris Edelman, David Pryor, Barbara Aranda-Naranjo, Carlos Garcia, and Kathi Light, thank you for everything. He dedicates his efforts to the memory of Jim Crane and Bob Connelly.

Introduction

Char Miller and Jeff Crane

Hope. For poet Emily Dickinson, it is the thing with feathers, a fearless little bird that sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all. The fact that its voice can be heard even above gale-force winds is only part of its embodied power, metaphorical and galvanic. Another strength is reflected in its plumage. Individually, feathers are lightweight, immaterial. Yet when hooked together—hollow shafts inserted in skin—they provide insulation and uplift, warmth and flight.¹

Hope. For novelist Barbara Kingsolver, it comes in the fragile form of the endangered and voiceless monarch butterfly, a central figure in her novel Flight Behavior (2012). A fictional homage to Dickinson’s poetic insights, Flight Behavior also carries a political charge. In it, hope becomes a potent force for social change. Not to be confused with its smiley-faced analog, optimism, that oft-uncritical expectation that things will get better because they always get better, hope is made of sterner stuff. Securing its potential—fictively and factually—requires agency, intention, and action: lift. Hope is, Kingsolver observes tellingly in an interview about her novel, a mode of survival and a form of resistance. It is how a cancer patient endures painful treatments. Hope is how people on a picket line keep showing up. If you look at hope that way, it’s not a state of mind but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands, to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages.²

Navigators need charts to see and prepare for the shoals that lie ahead. The Nature of Hope offers one such mapping of the past as a guide, however complicated and fraught, to those who would act in and on the present and who seek a way forward to a more sustainable, just, and humane future. This book focuses on the dynamics of environmental activism and does so through an examination of the environmental and political cultures that have emerged in response to such contentious issues as mining in national parks, mitigation and adaption to the challenges climate change poses, and the dilemmas some South Texas communities have faced as their wealth and woes spiked with the advent of the hydraulic-fracturing boom. It probes as well the significance of urban farmers pursuing food justice, those confronted with toxic chemicals in the air and water, and others rallying to defeat a proposed expansion of a US air base in Japan. It also taps into the energy animating housing and worker-rights activists and those challenging the militarization of the US-Mexico border. Collectively, these chapters are also reflective of the drive for greater democracy, a politics of hope on the most fundamental of levels—human and ecological health—within communities large and small.

The stories these chapters interrogate demonstrate equally that local activism is as important and meaningful to the preservation of democracy as the protection of the environment, broadly defined. National environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and the Wilderness Society have grown into the hegemons of American environmentalism, exerting considerable influence in defining environmental issues at the national level and thus on the flow of money and political support to them and the issues they define as important. These organizations’ dominance, for all their legislative success, has overshadowed the many community-based environmental battles that have profoundly shaped US environmental culture. These latter movements and moments are the focus of The Nature of Hope. In chapters framed around the fights over the wilderness areas in the Northern Cascades and the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County, California; brawls over flood control in San Antonio, Texas; battles to shutter coal-fired energy plants in North Carolina, and a host of other underreported struggles, this anthology illuminates the unsung and unstinting efforts of those fighting to protect the environments they inhabit. These activists—women and men, the poor and dispossessed, the young and old, those more vulnerable, others not—have pursued this work in the face of the failure of state and federal governments to adequately deal with the resulting degradation of air, water, and soil, food, infrastructure, and community life. In an age of environmental crisis, apathy, and deep-seated cynicism—to say nothing of a distressingly polarized political landscape—these engagements suggest how a politics of hope can offer an intersectional and compelling model of resistance, resilience, and regeneration.

Another objective of this book is to complicate assumptions about the paradigms that define the environmental movement in the United States—whether that involves certain celebrated, male leaders (think naturalist John Muir, the presidents Roosevelt, or activist David Brower); particular organizations such as Greenpeace; thematic orientations (such as conservationism, utilitarianism, and preservationism); or the human construction of nature and Nature viewed through an anthropocentric, romantic, or biocentric lens. There is nothing wrong with these varied classifications, but if we strictly or solely adhere to them, we will continue to overlook the powerful role of intersectionality in shaping the on-the-ground dynamics of popular protest and social change.

As the essays in The Nature of Hope make clear, new styles of leadership have emerged, which Bill McKibben likens to distributive energy production. The new structures of organizing are thus more horizontal and local than hierarchical and central. This shift is one reason why academics and activists need to pay closer attention to some of the critical implications that emerge from these stories about ecological activism so we can better understand why protecting the environment has been and remains so critical to sustaining the health of civil society (and vice versa). Consider, for example, the role the nation’s wealth of nature has played in its development. Yet that development has always come at a cost, contested by those who disproportionately bear its burdens. Across time, Americans have organized in opposition to forms of ecological change and environmental degradation that have undercut their social status, community strength, and economic opportunities. Many of these principled efforts to protect or improve the environment have resulted in democratization at all levels of government: every campaign to preserve green space, limit pesticide poisoning, obtain environmental justice, or slow climate change has resulted in corresponding alterations—some limited, some not—in the political process. These include greater access to government documents and information, expanded participation by traditionally marginalized constituencies, and the creation of broad-based, intersecting political coalitions. The ongoing efforts of Americans—wherever they were born—to confront and resolve environmental issues has regenerated our politics while managing the core problems that affect everyone: clean air and water, disrupted climates, species protection, and the production of and access to healthy food.

To help identify some of these changes and their manifold ramifications, we have structured this anthology around a set of themes. The first, Building Agency, lays out the theoretical terrain and ideological insights that set the stage for subsequent chapters. The title of Bill McKibben’s essay—Movements without Leaders—speaks volumes (and directly to one of this volume’s organizing motifs): that new models of leadership must guide the global effort to respond to climate change and its imperiling of all species. Indeed, he advocates what he calls a new planetary architecture of leadership that builds off the diligent work of innumerable local organizations and interest groups and charts an intersectional relationship between them. The result is a new kind of movement: We may not need capital-L Leaders, but we certainly need small-l leaders by the tens of thousands. You could say that instead of a leaderless movement, we need a leader-full one.

Brinda Sarathy underscores and expands this compelling claim in her close analysis of the academic literature on environmental justice, as concept and praxis. At the heart of her project is how the theoretical and the applied intersect: The concept of environmental justice is not only composed of discrete types (such as environmental racism, sexism, and classism), she observes, but these varying dimensions often interact together in important ways. The nature of these interactions matters not just for the manifestation of environmental harm within a community but also for the shape of social movement activity in response to those harms. Sarathy’s insight is then tested and revealed in Cody Ferguson and Paul Hirt’s analysis of the degree to which environmental issues are debated, negotiated, and adjudicated on local, state, and federal levels. One of their focuses is on Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), a grassroots organization in rural eastern and central Tennessee that in the 1970s emerged in opposition to landfills and strip mining. But these site-specific issues were also global in their reach: SOCM’s members were concerned about water and air pollution and the health of their families and communities; their understanding of environmental issues was tightly woven into ideals of good government and the notion that citizens ought to have a right to participate in decisions that affect their lives. These local activists discovered, as Bill McKibben would forty years later, that creating a more accountable, participatory, and transparent nation requires a long view, an enduring vigilance, and a deep commitment to the power of individual and collective agency—and a multitude of leaders. Such can only happen with a spread-out and yet thoroughly interconnected movement, a new kind of engaged citizenry, McKibben writes. Rooftop by rooftop, we’re aiming for a different world, one that runs on the renewable power that people produce themselves in their communities in small but significant batches. The movement that will get us to such a new world must run on that kind of power too.

Identifying the physical environment in which such change has occurred and can occur is the subject of the second section, Spatial Dynamics. Each of its chapters explores particular locations—Portland, San Antonio, Tachikawa, and the US-Mexico borderlands—and sets their specific environmental-justice challenges in their unique historical contexts. For African Americans whose neighborhoods abutted the Columbia Slough in Portland, World War II brought new work and housing; but as Ellen Stroud explores these glimmering opportunities, she also uncovers the racial segregation and social injustice embedded in a low-lying landscape wracked by floods, disease, and death. These social forces and health stressors circumscribed residents’ life chances: Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the land near the Columbia Slough appeared on the cognitive map of many Portlanders as a throwaway place, an area best suited to industry and waste. That perception, which has a multiplicity of origins, was as much a cause as an effect of the environmental disaster at the slough.

Many of these same pressures confronted those living in San Antonio’s flood-prone and dense west-side barrios. Char Miller probes how Communities Organized for Public Services, a Hispanic organization that emerged in the early 1970s to combat flooding in these impoverished neighborhoods, achieved its goals only after it undercut Anglo domination of that city’s government and thereby gained access to local, state, and federal financial resources to develop flood-control projects that protected these oft-inundated communities. Political change was also the result of intense protests in the mid-1950s over the expansion of the US air base in Tachikawa, Japan. Its markers are embodied, Adam Tompkins and Charles Laurier argue, as much in the composition of the cross-sector, mass movement of farmers and urban residents taking on the US Air Force as in the final, striking result of their actions: the military base became a park, concrete turned into grass.

Those activists protesting the construction of the infamous border wall separating the United States and Mexico, just south of San Diego, have also pushed for a more sustainable, life-affirming solution. Under directives from the George W. Bush administration, in 2007 contractors began to erect a triple-layer structure that bisected Friendship Park and cut off access to that once open space, part of a 700-mile-long project designed to halt the undocumented from crossing into a post-9/11 America. Over the next three years, activists held weekly prayer vigils just off-site as well as routine meetings with US Border Patrol officials. Their engagement bore fruit in two directions—a binational grassroots movement emerged, stronger than either segment alone could have been; and for a time the Border Patrol conceded some ground such that families trapped on either side of the wall would be able to see one another. Still, as Jill M. Holslin points out, not all victories endure. Indeed, in 2018, the Trump administration, after further militarizing the border and criminalizing those seeking asylum in the United States, then tore immigrant children from their parents. The right to a salubrious environment proves to be an equally contested and polarizing issue in American society. This concept constitutes the heart of this volume’s third section, Healthy Politics. The right to a healthy environment emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, families—especially mothers—found that they needed to question the impact of global military conflict on their children’s bodies. Jeffrey C. Sanders analyzes a series of women-led peace groups and their activist rhetoric that fused protection of their progeny’s health in the Atomic Age with a call to break the silence Cold War anti-communism inflicted on Americans because of the damage it was inflicting on American bodies. The bones, blood, and thyroids of children living in the United States moved to the center of the political debate over nuclear testing, Sanders indicates, and inspired a movement. Part of what made it so inspiring—and catalyzing—was how the activists developed and disseminated new knowledge about the life-threatening effects of radioactivity in defiance of corporate, state, and federal scientists. The pressing need to develop citizen science emerged anew in the 1980s. In response to the Reagan administration’s concerted effort to block citizens’ access to scientific expertise, argues Michael Egan, a pair of grassroots organizations galvanized policy for their protection by doing the work they felt government agencies were not. Their struggles to examine the carcinogenic impact of industrial pollution in Woburn, Massachusetts, and the consequences of spraying daminozide on apple orchards ran up against stonewalling corporations and agencies. As a result, these groups were compelled to produce their own reliable environmental information as a means of evaluating social risks, a popular epidemiology that became an important strategy in confronting toxic fear; this strategy remains a vital part of an American environmentalism worried about toxins in the air, soil, and water.

A related anxiety that has also generated new forms of local knowledge and an uptick in political engagement revolves around food production itself. In response to scientific evidence detailing the residual impact of spraying pesticides on crops, spikes in obesity and related health problems linked to ubiquitous fast-food restaurants, and the existence of food deserts in many poor neighborhoods, an urban agricultural movement sprang up in the last decades of the twentieth century. In tracking its historical development and policy implications, Jeff Crane asserts that community farming is an identifiable form of environmental protest that, among other things, can reclaim lost knowledge, restore human health, regenerate brown fields, and rebuild communal solidarity. Yet who is involved in these community deliberations and progressive outcomes and whose needs they are projected to meet are integral to these projects’ success. Anna J. Kim and Sophia Cheng confirm that expanding the range of people directly engaged on such issues is necessary to create sustainable communities. Doing so requires that we recognize the interconnectedness of the urban and rural, the human and environmental, the social and the natural. It is just as essential to identify the links between paradigms and to recognize the inequalities embedded within them as symptoms of problems of the ecosystem. In a case study of this intertwining, Kim and Cheng assess the labor conditions of contemporary workers in Los Angeles and the layered injustices they endure. In this manner, exposure to toxins in the workplace, like wage theft, food insecurity, and environmental inequality, are parts of a larger whole, militating against human sustainability.

The effort to sustain communities became a good deal more complicated with the advent of the Trump presidency. In a spate of late January 2017 Executive Orders, the new president undercut the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and froze the US Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and hiring (while his political appointees to that agency wiped clean its hitherto robust data on climate change). He asserted that the border wall separating the United States and Mexico would be completed and he approved construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline. The latter is a signal of his administration’s commitment to ramping up oil, gas, and mineral extraction while further delaying climate-change action—a point it hammered home when it pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and radically undermined domestic environmental protections. These and other declarations, along with like-minded policies, immediately generated an array of grassroots protests and legal challenges, an oppositional strategy that has a lengthy history dating back to the early twentieth century. Those earlier confrontations did not always succeed, and the same mixed outcome surely awaits those who have resisted the latest efforts to put profits before people, to elevate the privileged few even farther above those who struggle to get by, to degrade America the Beautiful because they can. Yet however partial previous campaigns to build a more resilient society and healthier environments may have been, they are a vivid reminder of the need for and capacity of local activism to assert its claims in the public arena, to fuse its calls for enhanced environmental protections and social justice with demands for a more open, accessible, and activist democracy.

Tracking these related concerns are the chapters included in the fourth section of The Nature of Hope—Challenging Resources. In his essay on the lengthy fight to stop Kennecott Cooper Corporation from extracting ore from within the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area in the Northern Cascades of Washington State, Adam Sowards sifts through public documents and private correspondence to recreate the tools activists employed to derail the project. However beautiful the landscape, however hopeful opponents were that its aesthetic qualities would change the corporation’s mind, their real success—and hope—lay in the political arena: in the constitutional system and citizen action—as well as a moral sense of right. This potent combination, Sowards writes, was cause for resounding optimism. There were other factors: Maybe the combination of copper prices, changing costs, and differing priorities tipped the balance. Yet as the historical record also makes clear, grassroots action made a difference to that place and that place made a difference to the grassroots, a reciprocal process that is evident as well in Hugh Fitzsimmons’s analysis of the politics of fracking in South Texas in the first decades of the twenty-first century. A rancher who reintroduced bison to its original range, Fitzsimmons has a personal stake in the damage to local water quantity and quality that hydraulic fracking in the Eagle Ford play has brought to his county, and this stake propelled him into the political arena: It was time for me to stop complaining and start campaigning. He won a seat on the local groundwater conservation district and was immediately drawn into a series of fights over serious aquifer draw-downs, contamination of once potable-water wells, and resulting threats to public health. His learning curve was steep, as was that of the larger community, and for all their shared activism and negotiations with industry to slow its vast uptake of local water supplies, the ultimate collapse of this energy boom may have been the real savior.

Salvation was harder to find in North Carolina, a state Duke Energy dominates—a dominance that a broad-based, multiply led, anti-coal movement has fought to check. Monica Mariko Embrey contributed to the development of this statewide coalition opposing the Charlotte-based utility’s dependence on fossil fuel, and her chapter therefore brings an insider’s perspective to community organizing. It also contains an academic understanding of how this environmental-justice group’s principles shaped its diverse, cross-generational, and deeply intersectional mission and objectives. This coalition’s political potency is a direct result of its ideological commitments: Building alignment between historically diverging environmental and environmental-justice movements, she notes, has enabled energy-justice activists to tackle the most formidable fossil-fuel industry and utility adversaries, which in turn made it possible to address the growing climate crisis.

Keeping fossil fuels in the ground and expanding a network of like-minded and intersecting alliances to disrupt the development and use of the nation’s energy infrastructure have similarly informed protests surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines. Bill McKibben’s opening essay in this volume addresses Keystone; bookending it is the final contribution, Kyle Powys Whyte’s analysis of how the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native peoples of the northern Plains, and non-tribal allies, beginning in 2012, battled the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Arguing that the project was one more expression of a settler colonialism that had long determined US and tribal relations and that its completion would degrade local water quality and inflict considerable harm on the cultural heritage of the Dakota and Lakota people (and had already destroyed ancestral burial sites), the tribes put their bodies in front of bulldozers. Knowing that direct action and personal sacrifice would raise national consciousness but would also need legal backing, their attorneys went to court. A mass movement around the call for sacred justice sprang up over the summer and fall of 2016. So forceful was the collective pushback that President Barack Obama, in the waning days of his administration, called for a delay in the pipeline’s construction until completion of a full environmental impact statement. The fact that his successor, through a January 2017 Executive Resolution, green-lit the project only underscores the thrust of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard’s argument about this struggle’s enduring significance: We must remember we are part of a larger story. We are still here. We are still fighting for our lives on our own land.

Sill here, still fighting. Unbending and unrepentant. Persistent and vigilant: hope.

Notes

1. Emily Dickinson, ‘Hope’ Is the Thing with Feathers, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 182.

2. Interview with Barbara Kingsolver appended in p.s., Flight Behavior (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 7.

Building Agency

1

Movements without Leaders

How to Make Change on an Overheating Planet

Bill McKibben

The history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality—it’s hard to shake. If you were young during the fight against Nazism, war seems a different, more virtuous animal than if you came of age during Vietnam. I was born in 1960, and so the first great political character of my life was Martin Luther King Jr. I had a shadowy, child’s sense of him when he was still alive and then a mythic one as his legend grew; after all, he had a national holiday. As a result, I think, I imagined that he set the template for how great movements worked. They had a Leader, capital L.

As time went on, I learned enough about the civil rights movement to know it was much more than Dr. King. There were other great figures, from Ella Baker and Medgar Evers to Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X; and there were tens of thousands more whom history doesn’t remember but who deserve great credit. And yet one’s early sense is hard to dislodge: the civil rights movement had his face on it. Gandhi carried the fight against empire; Susan B. Anthony, the battle for suffrage.

That is why it is a little disconcerting to look around and realize that most of the movements of the moment—even highly successful ones like the fight for gay marriage or immigrant’s rights—don’t really have easily discernible leaders. I know that there are highly capable people who have worked overtime for decades to make these movements succeed and that they are well-known to those within the struggle, but there aren’t particular people the public at large identifies as the face of the fight. The world has changed in this way, and for the better.

It’s true, too, in the battle where I’ve spent most of my life: the fight to slow climate change and hence give the planet some margin for survival. We had a charismatic leader in Al Gore, but he was almost the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, a politician makes a problematic leader for a grassroots movement because boldness is hard when you still envision higher office; for another, even as he won the Nobel Prize for his remarkable work in spreading climate science, the other side used every trick and every dollar at its disposal to bring him down. He remains a vital figure in the rest of the world (partly because there he is perceived less as a politician than as a prophet), but at home his power to shape the fight has been diminished.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the movement is diminished. In fact, it’s never been stronger. In the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone Pipeline, convinced a wide swathe of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil-fuel stocks, and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas. It may not be winning the way gay marriage has won, but the movement itself continues to grow quickly, and it’s starting to claim some victories. That’s not despite its lack of clearly identifiable leaders, I think. It’s because of it.

A Movement for a New Planet

We live in a different world from that of the civil rights movement. Save perhaps for the spectacle of presidential elections, there’s no way for individual human beings to draw the same kind of focused and sustained attention they did back then. At the moment, you could make the three evening newscasts and the cover of Time (not Newsweek, alas) and still not connect with most people. Our focus is fragmented and segmented, which may be a boon or a problem, but mostly it’s just a fact. Our attention is dispersed.

When we started 350.org in 2008, we dimly recognized this new planetary architecture. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a central place—the Mall in Washington, DC—for a protest, we staged twenty-four hours of rallies around the planet: 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history. And we’ve gone on to do more of the same—about 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea.

Part of me, though, continued to imagine that a real movement looked like the ones I’d grown up watching—or maybe some part of me wanted the glory of being a leader. In any event, I’ve spent the last few years in constant motion around the country and the Earth. I’d come to think of myself as a leader, and indeed my book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, reflects on that growing sense of identity. However—and it’s the curse of an author that sometimes you change your mind after your book is in type—I’ve come to like the idea of capital L leaders less and less. It seems to me to miss the particular promise of this moment: that we could conceive of and pursue movements in new ways.

For environmentalists, we have a useful analogy close at hand. We’re struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, in which a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this distributed generation, and it comes with myriad benefits. It’s not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. It can make use of dispersed energy instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements. This idea was behind the 2014 nationwide series of rallies called Summerheat. We didn’t organize them ourselves. We knew great environmental-justice groups all over the country, and we knew we could highlight their work while making links between, say, standing up to a toxic Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, and standing up to the challenge of climate change.

From the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned; from Utah’s Colorado Plateau, where the first US tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio—Summerheat demonstrated the local depth and global reach of this emerging fossil-fuel resistance. I’ve had the pleasure of going to talk at all these places and more besides, but I wasn’t crucial to any of them. I was, at best, a pollinator, not a queen bee.

Or, consider a slightly older fight. In 2012 the Boston Globe magazine put a picture of me on its cover under the headline The Man Who Crushed the Keystone Pipeline. I’ve got an all-too-healthy ego, but even I knew that it was over the top. I’d played a role in the fight, writing the letter that asked people to come to Washington to resist the pipeline, but it was effective because I’d gotten a dozen friends to sign it with me. And I’d been one of 1,253 people who went to jail in what was the largest civil disobedience action in this country in years. It was their combined witness that got the ball rolling. And once it was rolling, the Keystone campaign became the exact model for the sort of loosely linked well-distributed power system I’ve been describing.

The big environmental groups played key roles, supplying lots of data and information while keeping track of straying members of Congress. Among them were the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and the National Wildlife Federation—none spending time looking for credit, all pitching in. The Sierra Club played a crucial role in pulling together the biggest climate rally yet, the February 2013 convergence on the Mall in Washington.

Organizations and individuals on the ground were no less crucial: the indigenous groups in Alberta and elsewhere that started the fight against the pipeline that was to bring Canadian tar sands to the US Gulf Coast graciously welcomed the rest of us without complaining about how late we were. Then there were the ranchers and farmers of Nebraska, who roused a whole stadium of football fans at a Cornhuskers game to boo a pipeline commercial, the scientists who wrote letters, the religious leaders who conducted prayer vigils. And don’t forget the bloggers who helped make sense of it all for us. One upstart website, InsideClimate News, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the struggle.

Non-experts quickly educated themselves on the subject, becoming specialists in the corruption of the US Department of State process that was to okay the building of that pipeline or in the chemical composition of the bitumen that would flow through it. CREDO (half an activist organization, half a cell phone company), as well as Rainforest Action Network and The Other 98%, signed up 75,000 people pledged to civil disobedience if the pipeline were to get presidential approval.

And then there was the Hip Hop Caucus, whose head, Lennox Yearwood, has roused one big crowd after another, and the labor unions—nurses and transit workers, for instance—who have had the courage to stand up to the pipeline workers’ union that would benefit from the small number of jobs to be created if Keystone were built. Then there are groups of Kids against KXL and a recent grandparents’ march from Camp David to the White House. Some of the most effective resistance has come from groups like Rising Tide and the Tarsands Blockade in Texas, which organized epic tree-sitting protests to slow construction of the southern portion of the pipeline.

The Indigenous Environmental Network has been every bit as effective in demonstrating to banks the folly of investing in Albertan tar-sands production. First Nations people and British Columbians have blocked a proposed pipeline that would take those same tar sands to the Pacific Ocean for shipping to Asia, just as inspired activists have kept the particularly carbon-dirty oil